"Well, they're WRONG!" responded our usability expert when we told her that rounded corner for tabs used in our page makes that object feels less serious. 

The design team, which I'm part of, believes that we can push the envelope by abstrating the shape without making it less usable.

The user researchers, however, argues that we have to closely follow the real world shapes and implementation.

Right after she said that, maybe also because she was very passionate about it, I thought to myself "You're not the expert in visual design, so how can you make that kind of statement?" 

I have to admit that I became defensive because I am the main designer for that page.

Now that I've managed to see the whole thing more objectively, I respect her opinion because I'm sure that's based on her extensive research experince . I also agree that abstracting shapes could break the paradigm and confuse users. Risky.

The question that I have is that the physical world is different from GUI on the screen, so how can we adapt a convention from real world and make it appropriate for screen interface? We can use fancy rendering to make something on screen looks tactile, but no matter what we do, we're still working on 2 dimensional medium, not 3 where we can use our tactile sense to enhance our sensibility.

A silly example: consider the hand icon that we use to click on links and buttons. In real world, our hands are always much bigger than the buttons that we push. If the button is much bigger than our hands, most likely one finger is not strong enough to push it. So if we strictly follow this proportion, we'd have hand cursor that would cover 10% of our screen.

It does not make any sense. So the GUI designer, maybe through iterations, who designed it decided to make the hand cursor small enough so we can see what we're clicking, and big enough we can still recognize its shape. The shape of that cursor, does not look like a real hand, in case you haven't noticed. If you don't believe me, you can compare it with your own hands. It's cartoony, but again, enough to convey the message that it's a hand.

So I think the question that we need to ask as we appropriate real world object for our on screen interface is: "What makes this convention works and what do we need to adjust to make it work in 2D environment?" 

This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 12:58 pm and is filed under usability, design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.